Scout woke Kai two hours before dawn with a thought that felt like ice water down the spine.
Found something in the deep channels. You need to see this right now.
The telepathic relay came through Shadow, who jerked awake near the den entrance with a startled chirp. The young kit was still getting used to being a living communication hub, and sudden urgent messages tended to make the crystal marking pulse bright enough to light up half the chamber.
"Scout's panicking," Shadow said, voice still rough from sleep. "Like genuinely losing it. That's really bad, right? That seems bad."
Kai was already moving toward the northern water access. The five stones they'd collected weeks ago sat arranged along the wall, silent witnesses to whatever was about to happen. Warnings carved by creatures who'd known their end was coming.
Maybe they were about to understand why those warnings had been so desperate.
Twitchy lifted their head from where the eldest kit had been curled near the youngest ones. Dig was sleep-mumbling something about structural improvements, probably redesigning the entire den in dreams. Current was pressed against Scout's empty sleeping spot like the young water specialist couldn't quite settle without the mentor nearby.
"Want me to come?" Twitchy asked quietly.
"Stay with them. If this is what I think it is..." Kai glanced back at those five patient stones. "We might need everyone ready soon."
The walk to the northern channel felt longer than usual. The pressure sense was picking up wrongness in the water flow. Not just changes anymore. Something more fundamental. Like the entire underground system was holding its breath before screaming.
Scout met Kai at the channel entrance, and the water specialist looked genuinely shaken. Scout had grown strong over the past weeks, lean muscle from constant swimming, but right now looked small. Diminished by whatever discovery had cracked that usual unflappable confidence.
"It's deep," Scout said, words tumbling out too fast. "Way past my normal mapping range. The pressure down there is insane and I turned back twice because it felt actively dangerous but there was this pull, you know? Like something was calling and I know that sounds completely unhinged but I swear—"
"Scout." Kai pressed close, offering warmth and calm through the physical contact. "Deep breath. Show me what you found."
They dove together into water that stole breath on contact. Cold. Shockingly, brutally cold. Scout navigated like the channels were an extension of the kit's own nervous system, reading currents Kai could barely perceive through pressure sense alone. Down through passages that twisted and narrowed until even thermal vision became mostly useless.
The pressure built until Kai's head felt like it might crack.
Then the tunnel opened into a submerged chamber, and understanding hit like a physical blow.
The stone was massive. Not fist-sized like the artifacts they'd been collecting. This thing was bigger than Kai. Bigger than Scar-Mandible. It had been embedded into the chamber wall with such precise engineering that thousands of years of violent water flow hadn't even scratched it.
Someone had done this deliberately. Had positioned it exactly right. Had wanted it to survive long enough for someone smart enough to find it.
Scout surfaced in a tiny air pocket at the chamber's edge, gasping. "I came back three times before I could even process what I was seeing. It's not just big. Look at the carvings."
Kai pulled closer, running claws carefully over the stone's surface. The patterns were more sophisticated than anything they'd found before. More detailed. More precise. More desperate in their precision.
The central figure looked like them. A World Cat or something very close. Definitely intelligent. Definitely aware. And around that figure, carved with such incredible detail it almost seemed to move in the faint bioluminescent glow, was water.
Not symbolic water. Not abstract representation. Someone had carved actual flowing currents with a level of detail that suggested they'd understood water intimately. Had lived with it. Had probably died in it.
And in that water, something was hunting.
Multiple limbs rendered in careful strokes. Too many to count easily. Teeth or mandibles, the perspective made it hard to tell, but definitely designed for tearing flesh. The predator's posture radiated patience. Intelligence. The kind of creature that understood its prey completely and could wait forever for the perfect killing moment.
"They weren't just warning about floods," Kai said slowly, the words forming as understanding clicked into place. "They were warning about what lives in the floods. What comes up with the water when the system purges."
Scout's thought came sharp through Shadow's distant relay. I've been finding traces for days now. Disturbed sediment in the deep channels. Movement patterns where nothing that large should exist. Fresh marks on stone that suggest something massive and recent. They're here. They're real. And I think they're getting closer to our territory.
The cold in Kai's chest had nothing to do with the water temperature.
"We need to bring this back. Everyone needs to see this."
"How?" Scout asked, ever practical even in the middle of existential crisis. "It's enormous. It's underwater. And it's literally embedded in solid rock. We'd need serious engineering to move it without destroying it or ourselves."
Kai thought of Dig back at the den. The young builder kit was only two weeks old but already showed such obsessive understanding of structural mechanics it was almost frightening. Give Dig a problem involving physics and leverage, and the kit would work until solving it or collapsing from exhaustion, whichever came first.
"Get Dig. And Shadow to coordinate everyone. We're going to need the whole colony for this."
Extraction was the only plan that made sense and it almost killed them.